Barth’s Revised Chalcedonianism
Introduction
Barth describes the event of reconciliation as the simultaneous but ordered movement of God to humanity and humanity to God. Concretely, the locus of the movement of God towards humanity and of humanity towards God is Jesus Christ who is both “the electing God … [and] the elected man” (II/1, 116).
As true God, i.e., the God who humbles himself, Jesus Christ is this true man, i.e., the man who in all His creaturliness is exalted above His creaturliness … What has happened in Him as the one true man is the conversion of all of us to God, the realization of true humanity … In Him humanity is exalted humanity, just as the Godhead is humiliated Godhead (IV/1, 131).
What the preceding phrases assert is that somehow—in some mysterious turn of events, God Himself became human in Jesus Christ and in doing so did not cease to be God. The question as to how God did such a thing was articulated clearly (though not perfectly, as we shall see) and propounded as a Church dogma by the bishops at Chalcedon in 451. In this essay, I aim to briefly explain how Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation both affirms and reconceptualizes the Formula of Chalcedon in a truly fresh and insightful way.
Barth’s Actualism
To comprehend the profundity of Barth’s Christology, we must understand at least one of the motifs characteristic of Barthian theology: actualism. George Hunsinger points out that actualism is perhaps Barth’s most distinctive and yet most difficult mode of thought (Hunsinger, 30). But generally, Barth’s actualism can be described as his insistence on speaking in terms of “occurrence, happening, event, history, decisions, and act” rather than in the language of “monadic or self-contained substances” (Ibid). For Barth, theology has to do with the description of actual events and relationships rather than abstract principles.
A paradigmatic example of Barth’s actualism is found in his doctrine of God. For Barth, it will not do for Christian theologians to begin with an abstract notion of the Godhead and subsequently attribute personal characteristics to God:
No general idea of ‘Godhead developed abstractly from such concepts must be allowed to intrude … [rather the definition of the] Godhead is something which … we must always learn from Jesus Christ. He defines those concepts: they do not define Him. When we start with the fact that He is very God we are forced to keep strictly to Him in relation to what we mean by true ‘Godhead’ (IV/1, 129).
Here, Barth has rejected all formulations of God’s being that rely on static or inactive terms. In insisting that we must always only “learn from Jesus Christ,” Barth is arguing that we must study the actual events of God’s movement into history; we must describe God in terms of his active relations. Most significant for our purposes, this means that whatever can be learned about God must be learned “in light of the fact that it pleased God … Himself to become man” (Ibid).
Barth’s Revised Chalcedonianism
After affirming Christ’s full deity and full humanity, the bishops at Chalcedon aimed to mark out the kind of unity that constitutes the conjoinment of Christ’s complete deity and complete humanity. Their answer employed the language of “nature.”
Irrespective of the Christological achievements of Chalcedon, this formula has registered a host of difficulties for theologians that still affect us today. It is not our purpose here to adumbrate the various Christological problems made possible by the Chalcedonian formula, but generally those problems lean towards either Appolinarian or Nestorian tendencies (McCormack, 358).
The Chalcedonian appeal to abstraction—viz. the language of nature, person, etc. derives from a timeless concept—a concept in abstraction from a thing’s lived history. This is precisely the kind of theoretical intrusion that Barth does not allow. Barth therefore reverses the process by attending not to a timeless notions of substance, but to God’s concrete acts in history. Since Jesus Christ is the culminating center of God’s acts in history, Barth begins with the incarnation, the beginning of the “historical facticity of what God has done” to answer the question “What are the conditions of God’s being that make possible his incarnation in time?” Barth treats this question in his doctrines of the Trinity and election (Ibid).
The Doctrine of the Trinity
Barth wants to make clear that God in eternity is a being-in-act:
The whole being and life of God is an activity, both in eternity and in worldly time, both in Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and in His relation to man and all creation. (II/2, 7). Jesus Christ is God as He is the One who takes part “in the event which constitutes the divine being …” He is “… Himself God as the Son of God the Father and with God the Father the source of the Holy Spirit, united in one essence with the Father by the Holy Spirit” (II/2, 129). The condition for the incarnation lies in the Son’s eternal generation. Likewise, the condition for Pentecost is found in the Spirit’s eternal procession from the Father and the Son. In other words, God’s acts in the events of human history correspond to His acts in eternity.
The Doctrine of Election
The reason why God’s acts in human history correspond to his acts in eternity is explained in Barth’s doctrine of election. For Barth, the doctrine of election first and foremost has to do with a decision God makes with respect to himself: “He does not will to be God without us” (II/2, 7). Included in God’s decision to be “God for us”—to be Emmanuel—is the decision for the incarnation. Most significantly, Barth points out that God’s decision to be “God for us” is an eternal decision:
The election of Jesus Christ is the eternal choice and decision of God …in the pre-temporal eternity of God, the eternal decision as such has its object and content the existence of this one created being, the man of Jesus of Nazareth” (II/2, 115).
In other words, there has never been a time when God had not already decided to be “God for us.” Therefore, when God acted in the incarnation he did not undergo ontological change because God is
the One whose eternity does not prevent but rather permits and commands Him to be in time and Himself to be temporal, whose omnipotence is so great that He can be weak and indeed impotent, as a man is weak and impotent.” (II/2, 129).
For our purpose, the most significant implication of the foregoing point is this: the Son of the Father never became “the Logos as human” for this has always been his identity! As McCormack has it, “The second person of the Trinity has—already in eternity—a name, and his name is Jesus Christ” (McCormack, 360). This is what Barth means when he declares that God has refused to be God without us.
Conclusion
Barth’s reconceptualization of the Chalcedonian Formula not only frees Christology from an ontology of abstraction that is foreign to the biblical witness, but it vivifies and integrates the formerly disparate doctrines of reconciliation, election, and the Trinity. We have also seen that Barth innovatively affirms the Chalcedonian Council’s intention to explain Christ’s complete humanity and complete deity while also forcefully staving off tendencies to extract the Logos from Jesus Christ’s human nature and vice a versa.